Instrumental

Sr. Software Engineer (Platform)

Reposted 23 Days Ago

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Palo Alto, CA, USA

Hybrid

185K-225K Annually

Senior level

Other

The Role

The Senior Platform Engineer will own the software development lifecycle, improve platform performance, and ensure alignment with engineering needs, particularly in AI tools and data processing.

Summary Generated by Built In

Instrumental builds the manufacturing acceleration platform behind the world’s most complex electronics. We capture digital exhaust and engineering context from assembly lines—images, test logs, BOM data, performance, repair cycles—and our AI engines identify insights that are difficult or impossible for human engineers to find. We accelerate the companies building the AI era by improving manufacturing yield, throughput, and ramp. NVIDIA, Meta, L3Harris, and their manufacturing partners rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product introduction and production.

Instrumental is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer who will take broad ownership of our platform layer: the services, pipelines, and infrastructure that the rest of engineering depends on. The ideal candidate will be able to operate independently on ambiguous problems, make sound architectural decisions with limited guidance, and raise the bar for the team through both their technical contributions and their influence on engineering practices. We are explicitly looking for someone who has already demonstrated sustained impact in a professional setting, ideally at a startup where they owned systems end-to-end.

What You’ll Be Doing:

Own the full software development lifecycle across design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations
Build and evolve core platform services with an emphasis on pragmatism, maintainability, and operational excellence
Improve system simplicity, reliability, security, observability, incident detection, and response
Leverage AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity and iteration speed
Identify, evaluate, and prioritize new tools, technologies, and technical debt based on ROI
Collaborate across engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities meet product, AI, and edge system needs

We’re Looking for Someone Who:

Has 5+ years of backend or platform engineering experience; startup experience required
Takes full ownership of production systems — from design through deployment and operations
Makes pragmatic, well-reasoned technical decisions and can articulate their tradeoffs
Is fluent in Python or Go; experience with other backend languages is a plus
Has experience with data modeling and data processing pipelines
Leads the way in AI tool adoption on their teams to improve development productivity and outcomes
Communicates clearly and collaborates effectively across teams

We’re a growing team that works collaboratively, supports each other, and is energized by having an impact. We value passion and the ability to learn — you’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t match the job description precisely!

The following is a representative annual base salary range for this position within the Bay Area: $170,000-$221,000. In addition, job level and salary opportunities are evaluated during our interview process — we review each applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Instrumental is proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits, including health, vision, dental, commuter plans, and parental leave.

At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. Employees are expected to comply with company engineering, security, access control, and privacy policies, and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.